Review Tropical Wars - Pirate Battles

Have you ever dreamed about the prospect of becoming a crazed koala pirate that sails the seven seas then you’ll love Tropical Wars for Android. It’s a free-to-play action strategy game where you’re building a fleet of ships in order to help protect your koala tribe. You’ll do it by engaging in epic battles between pirates and building up your base so that you’re better prepared to take on what lies ahead.

You’ll start off the game with a tutorial that puts you right in the middle of a battle. Fighting takes care of itself for the most part, though you do have active skills you can use to try and strategically turn the tide of battle. Combat does play out in real time and you’ll watch as your fleet of ships takes on enemies. It all looks pretty great as a spectacle.

The tutorial is long and drawn out, however. You have to build things when the game wants you to build them, otherwise you’ll get a dialogue box that pops up telling you that you’re basically going to have to step in line. I always find tutorials to be a bit useless because every mobile game plays so similar. Developers really need a skip tutorial button so that experienced players can just jump right in.

The base building mechanics are exactly what you expect them to be. You have workers that artificially limit how much and how often you can build, along with timers. You’ll earn currency as you assign workers to gather them, but they’ll fall asleep if you leave them for too long unattended. Every amounts to a lot of busy work.

Tropical Wars has a fun combat system, but the game’s base building mechanics tend to be a more of a lesson in labor than I’d like it to be.